This disclosure relates generally to image processing, and more specifically to identification of pharmaceutical compositions (e.g., pills) by automated means.
Medication errors cause at least one death every day in the United States and injure approximately 1.3 million people annually. A Food and Drug Administration (FDA) study of fatal medication errors found that the most common errors involving medications were related to the administration of an improper dose of medicine (41%) and administration of the wrong medication (14%). Almost half of the fatal medication errors occurred in people over the age of 60, who often take multiple prescription medications. Such medication errors continue to occur despite federal regulations implemented in 1995 that require imprinting of identification codes on all medication solid oral-dosage forms.
The task of administering medications to a patient in a hospital or nursing home environment remains a manual process with limited quality assurance and a task that is highly subject to human error. Typically, a nurse reads a patient's prescription, opens a bottle of pills with the intended medication, places the pills in a small unlabeled plastic cup, carries the cup to the patient's bedside, and directs the patient to take the pills in the cup. There is no independent quality assurance process to confirm 1) that the correct medication and number of pills are placed in the plastic cup, 2) that the medications are delivered to the correct patient, or 3) that the medication is being administered at the correct time (e.g., not more than every 4 hours).
Likewise, patients in a home environment shoulder a substantial amount of responsibility in managing their own medications, which can result in medication errors. Common errors in the home include taking the wrong dosage or quantity of pills, forgetting to take certain medications or doses, taking the medication at the wrong time, too many times a day, or not enough times a day, among other problems. For patients taking multiple medications a day or having medication regimes involving complex timing and administration factors, careful day-to-day management of medications can become quite difficult.
Errors in medications can also arise in the pharmacy environment. Filled prescriptions can be mislabeled with the incorrect dosage or amount of pills, or with the incorrect medication. Pharmacists can dispense the wrong drug, quantity, or dosage, which are mistakes that can result in serious injury or death of the patient. Pharmacists can make these types of mistakes as a result of being overworked or distracted, or even due to confusion between medication names that are similar, or pills that have similar physical appearances.
What is needed is a mechanism for quickly and easily identifying medication in an automated way to ensure the correct medication and dosage are provided. As part of an automated medication and dosage system, pills must be identified and confirmed as the intended pill for a patient. A particular challenge of automated identification of pills is that a pill may be identified by any arbitrary markings chosen by a pharmaceutical company. For example, pills may include arbitrary shapes, surface features, lettering fonts and orientation, color, and the like. These aspects of a pill's character provide particular challenges to pill identification methods. In addition, solutions that require a pill to be oriented in a particular way for identification cause undue delay as a machine or operator orients the pill.